Moby Dick, monster of the forbidden seas

6

IN 1839 eighteen-year-old Herman Melville, the son of a prominent but impoverished American family, sailed as a deckhand from New York to Liverpool and back aboard the packet ship St. Lawrence. This was his first taste of the sea. Less than two years later, after a short and unsuccessful spell as a teacher, he returned. Signing on this time as a lowly whalerman, despite his genteel origins, he embarked upon the Acushnet, which took him from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, round Cape Horn, to the Pacific. There, after deserting the Acushnet and becoming involved in a mutiny on another whaling ship, he became variously a harpooner and beachcomber on islands from the Galapagos-where just a few years earlier Charles Darwin had preceded him on board the Beagle--to Tahiti. In 1844 he returned to Boston from Honolulu as an enlisted seaman aboard the man-of-war United States.

It was then that his writing career truly began, informed by his first-hand experience of the sea, its calms and tempests, its exhilarations and tribulations. For Melville, the sea was both massively actual, alive with observable creation, yet at the same time a kind of cosmic key or cipher. Within its ebbs and flows, its moving surfaces and mysterious depths, its plenitude of life-forms from plankton to leviathans, was to be found the very riddle of existence. "You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in", he proclaimed.

He could hardly have better indicated the ocean dimensions of the epic tale then taking shape in his imagination, one which would take its hero, Captain Ahab and his ship-of-all-nations, the Pequod, backwards and forwards across the great Atlantic and Pacific fishing lanes in pursuit of that most sumptuous of aquatic creatures, the white whale, Moby Dick, which would give its name to his novel.

A LONGSTANDING TRADITION

Yet in speaking of "sea-room" Melville was also aligning himself with a very longstanding tradition in Western culture. The Book of jonah, to take one starting-point, explicitly alluded to in Chapter 9 of Moby Dick, relates a parable of would-be flight and guilt in which the sea is portrayed as the tempestuous domicile of a "great fish" that swallows and later spews forth the recalcitrant prophet. Then there is Homer who, with the Iliad and the Odyssey, composed epics that became founding stories in the Graeco-Roman legacy. In the latter, especially, which recounts Odysseus's journey homeward to his faithful wife Penelope after the Trojan war, we have one of the classic expressions of the sea as both actual and figurative domain.

Other landmarks in Western literature, the anonymous Beowulf and the Nordic sea sagas, delineate the sea as a place of northern dark and cold. Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff, a fifteenth-century German satiric masterpiece, bequeaths us the image of a Ship of Fools afloat on a sea of illusion and false hopes. The European Renaissance, an age of boundless discovery, yields images of the sea as at once a site for battles and piracy, for the unknown, and for possible routes to Utopla, reflected in Shakespeare's The Tempest or Camoes's Os Lusiadas (The Lusiads), the national epic of Portugal. Camoes, not incidentally, was favourite reading for Melville. Other poetry of the sea ranges from Coleridge's ghostly The Ancient Mariner to Rimbaud's intensely imagined Le bateau ivre, with the lyrics of a Fernando Pessoa, a Hart Crane or a Rafael Alberti there to enrich the list.

But it has perhaps been in the modern novel that the sea has found its most striking literary expression. Who has not relished the voyaging and the shipwrecks of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver's Travels or Stevenson's Treasure Island? Do not Antarctic fantasias like Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym or jules Verne's underwater empire of Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea weave a spell which extends well beyond childhood? Nor has the sea lost any of its fascination for our century, though it does have a growing rival in the immensities of outer space. In joseph Conrad, Polish-born and also an ex-mariner, one can turn to a tale of the Malaysian Straits like Lord Jim or of ocean journeying from the Thames to the River Congo in Heart of darkness. English fiction also supplies Virginia Woolf's The Waves, a "modernist" classic in which the sea acts as a metaphor of human consciousness, and, as recently as the 1980s, William Golding's Rites of passage, the fictionalized log of a late-eighteenth-century crossing to Australia. In these too, the sea goes beyond mere theme: its rhythms and cadences get drawn into the very story-telling itself.

Herman Melville thus joins distinguished company, and not only on account of Moby Dick. The sea marks much of his other fiction. Still, it is Melville's "whale-book", as he liked to call it, which remains central. Perhaps this is because Moby Dick so dazzlingly combines high adventure with philosophy, authentic sea lore with a taste for metaphysics. "I have written a wicked book", Melville told his fellow writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, "and feel as spotless as the lamb". How, then, does Melville's epic picture the sea?

Firstly, there is the sea as a physical power, Melville's ability to render the smack of wind and current. Nowhere more dramatically does he do so than when Ahab and his men confront the breaching of the white whale:

"Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his pace to the distance of seven miles or more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane

Here, sea and whale become one, the ocean as a kingdom with leviathan as one of its ruling presences. Few of Nature's dramas, for Melville, ever matched the sight of a Sperm Whale rising from out of the sea's very depths.

But Melville knew the sea to have a myriad of quite other incarnations. It could also be a place of rapacity, of warring and predatory species and none more so than the shark. With just the right touch of gallows humour, he describes how sharks will rip into the flesh of a captured whale:

"....thousands of sharks, swarming around the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their trails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers' hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head. . . ."

In contrast, in a chapter appropriately called "The Grand Armada", Melville depicts the sea as wonderfully feminine and maternal, an arena for birth as much as death. He describes a whaleboat which inadvertently has steered into a school of newly born whales and their mothers:

"But far between this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time . . . even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us

At the heart of the engaging peace and beauty of this scene is Melville's recognition that however we may view the sea, it always retains its own way of being. Hence the infant whales look towards, but not at, their human observers.

FORBIDDEN SEAS

As, too, the Pequod travels ever closer towards destruction, Melville undertakes an extensive survey of every aspect of whale life. He takes a positive pleasure in playing the self-appointed role of cetologist, supplying lists, systems of categorization, quotations and fables from a multitude of sources-and not least from legendary explorers like Thomas Cook and Charles Darwin. He proves just as alert in describing dolphins porpoises, walruses, brit, crustacea, seabirds, and the huge floating colonies of algae and seaweed. It is almost as if he wants to drive home the vital, incalculable abundance of the seas and their function as repositories, places of rebirth and continuity. What is more, if ever a book cautioned against ecological arrogance, it is Moby Dick. In our own nuclear age, in which global warming and pollution have become everyday facts, Melville's story of Ahab's monomania and of a technology which seeks to maim or even destroy one of creation's supreme creatures could not offer a timelier warning.

Yet rooted in fact as they are, Melville's accounts of the sea and its creatures are also interspersed with flights of speculation and philosophy. From the outset, Ishmael, the narrator, makes no secret of the matter. Contemplating his own going to sea, he declares "Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever". He speaks of the great seas as "watery prairies" which arouse nothing less than "mystical vibrations". "Noah's flood", he muses at a later point, "is not yet subsided; two thirds of the world it still covers". And with an eye to the sea as a source of endlessly proliferating myth and ritual, he invokes two of the most ancient of world cultures:

"Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and make him the own brother of jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all."

In passages like this, Moby Dick confirms how Melville writes both a sea-story, one of the greatest, yet also something infinitely more ambitious. The Pequod's "voyage-out", in another of his phrases, may well take us literally, exhilaratingly, into an Atlantic or Pacific. But it also takes us into matching other seas, forbidden seas" as Ishmael calls them. These are the seas which exist within us and where the very first and last of all meanings might be encountered.

The Tempest
Ariel's song
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange....
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.
BURTHEN
Ding-dong
ARIEL
Hark! now I hear them--
Ding-dong bell.
                William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
                      English dramatist and poet
                                The Tempest

A. ROBERT LEE, of the United Kingdom, teaches American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is editor of an edition of Moby Dick (Everyman Library, 1975) and of 12 volumes in a "Critical Studies" series published by Vision Press (London), the most recent of which are devoted to Herman Melville (1984), Edgar Allan Poe (1986) and William Faulkner (1990).

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